In the autumn of 1888 the streets of London were streets of terror. The cause -- a series of mysterious and apparently motiveless murders. Respectable citizens cowered behind shuttered windows and multi-locked doors. Ironically, however, it was not the respectable who were in danger. The victims were all drawn from the trade which necessity still compelled to haunt dark alleys and doorways at dead of night -- the prostitutes. Theories on the identity of the murderer have been many and various: that he was a fashionable doctor, even that he was a she - a midwife. Robin Odell has produced an absorbing factual reconstruction of all the crimes and a brilliant new theory, based on modern methods of detection, to solve the greatest mystery in British criminology. Most readers will accept his theory as the long-sought answer to a baffling real-life whodunit: as the most likely epitaph on a terror known as "Jack the Ripper in Fact & Fiction".

Exhumation of A Murder is a comprehensive study of the case of Major Armstrong, the celebrated Hay Poisoner, one of the most notorious murderers of the twentieth century and the only solicitor ever to hang. It is one of those classic old-fashioned English murders, which hail from the heyday of the courtroom drama when, with the hangman lurking in the pine-and-panel wings and the black cap an object of horryfyingly alarming currency rather than mere symbolism, the loser in 'the black dock's dreadful pen lost all'. And the Armstrong case was unquestionably one of the best; right up there in the grand tradition of Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon and George Joseph Smith. Contains a wealth of original photographs and documentation.

You couldn't make it up: incredible real-life criminal cases A fascinating A-Z of murderous crimes which spans the globe and the centuries in uncovering the extremes of human criminality in all its strangeness. This collection of unusual, if not sensational, murder cases recalls strange crimes of the past and offers insights into particularly macabre and shocking modern murders. Many of the cases also shed light on advances in crime detection, law enforcement and forensic science. Cases include: Krystian Bala, the Polish writer who killed a rival, and then used the murder as the plot for a novel; Alexander Pichuskin, who was stopped one short of killing the 64 victims he needed to 'fill a chess board'; John Lee, 'the man they could not hang' who survived three attempts to execute him; and Adelaide Bartlett, who was accused of killing her husband with chloroform, but was acquitted because no one could work out how she had done it - and she wouldn't say.

Fact is never more strange than fiction than when it comes to crime, and the crimes described here are so bizarre it's inconceivable that they could have been made up. In this all-new collection of truly unusual crimes, a sequel to the bestselling Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes, Odell and Donnelley tell the extraordinary stories of criminal acts far stranger than any fiction, including the murder of Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace by spree-killer Andrew Cunanan and the killing of intern Chandra Ann Levy, who had had an affair with US Representative Gary Condit, though he was cleared of any involvement in her murder. They reveal how Danilo Restivo was eventually convicted of the murder of Heather Barnett in England after the ritualistic placing of hair connected him to another murder in Italy. They tell the terrible story of the inexplicably brutal murder, over a number of days, of 15-year-old Kristy Bamu by his sister and her lover because they believed him to be practising 'witchcraft'. They also give a chilling account of the thirty-one-year-old mother-of-two, Joanna Dennehy, who killed three men. 'I started killing,' she said, 'to see if I was as cold as I thought I was. Then it got moreish and I got a taste for it.'

The development of forensic pathology in Britain is told here through the lives of five outstanding medical pioneers. Spanning seventy years, their careers and achievements marked major milestones in the development of legal medicine, their work and innovation laying the foundations for modern crime scene investigation (CSI). Bernard Spilsbury, Sydney Smith and Professors Glaister, Camps and Simpson were the original expert witnesses. Between them, they performed over 200,000 postmortems during their professional careers, establishing crucial elements of murder investigation such as time, place and cause of death. This forensic quintet featured in many of the notable murder trials of their time, making ground-breaking discoveries in the process. They were treated as celebrities by the media, and news that they were 'on the case' featured in numerous headlines. In the best traditions of scholarship, they also worked as teachers, passing on their knowledge and experience to future pathologists.

Criminologist Robin Odell has complied this gruesome gallery of cases from all over the world, revealing the growth in serial slayings, contract killings and middle-class murders and investigating what motivates people to commit the ultimate crime. As well as gangsters and ordinary felons, "Murder: The Book" includes doctors, millionaires, housewives, children, lawyers, accountants, officers and gentlemen who have succumbed to the killing instinct. Behind the sensational names concocted by the tabloid press - 'Boston Strangler', 'Dracula Killer', 'Night Stalker', 'Granny Killer' - lurk real murderers committing acts of violence in circumstances often more bizarre than fiction. Arranged in an easy-to-use A-Z format, the book contains over 500 cases from serial killers such as Dennis Nilsen and Ted Bundy, to those such as Jeremy Bamber and Stevn Benson who dispatched their parents for money; from murderous New Zealand teenagers whose story made a successful film, to the many doctors and nurses who took life instead of saving it; from unsolved murders such as the murder of Little Gregory in France to the paid assignments of John Waynes Hearn, a Vietnam veteran who killed to order. The result is a new classic of true crime, a definitive work on murder as a worldwide phenomenon.